Theological Essays/IX

Whenever such broad statements are put forward as those which I have endeavoured to defend in my last four Essays,—that Christ is the Lord of man; that He took the nature of man, that He reconciled man and God by the sacrifice of Himself; that He rose again, as the Redeemer of man, from death, the grave, and hell,—there arises in our minds a fear which is both natural and righteous. Does not such language overlook the notorious fact that good and evil men are mixed together in this world,—that the evil far outnumber the good? Does it not break down moral distinctions, which it is our first duty to preserve? Does it not practically deny that God approves the just and condemns the wicked ?

No one should be weary of answering these objections, or should complain because they rise up again and again after he fancies that he has disposed of them. Though the whole purpose of his argument may have been to show how essentially and eternally opposed Good and Evil are; how impossible it is that they ever can blend together; what, according to God’s revelation of Himself, He has done and is doing to ​separate them;—he must not be the least grieved if he should be met at last with the observation, "What you talk about the redemption of mankind, means nothing after all. It is a mere dogma or technicality, with which those who are not in contact with the actual world may amuse themselves. We who are, know that, instead of identifying ourselves with the mass of the creatures around us, we must learn how we may become most entirely unlike them, or we never shall be like Him who you say is perfectly Good and True." Such words, even though they may be uttered in a very contemptuous tone, would not excite any displeasure in us, if our own minds were in a right and healthy state. We should welcome them as signs that the speaker had an honest and deep conviction which he will not part with, and which must be thoroughly satisfied before he takes in any other. And it is the less excusable to manifest any irritation when we are the subjects of this kind of animadversion, because we know, or ought to know, that this difficulty, in one shape or other, has given occupation to every age of the Christian Church; that it has been no sooner overcome by a mighty effort in one direction, than it has reappeared in another; that it has therefore all the tokens of being a practical human difficulty, and one of so grave a kind that people have been compelled to seek an explanation of it; and that when they have sought, they have found. The past experiences of the world, in this and in all cases, are not warrants for discouragement; if we use them faith- fully, they are full of hope.

1. The Church, after the days of the Apostles, was no longer contending chiefly with Jewish sects which claimed to be portions of the one divine nation. It ​was in the midst of a huge empire which hated it, and with the principles of which it was at war. Its members must carefully distinguish themselves from those among whom they dwelt, with whom they trafficked, who were under the same protection or tyranny. Baptism was the sign of their fellowship. Baptism must separate the Churchman from the common earthly man. It could not merely denote an outward contrast. The new dispensation had penetrated below the surface to the roots of things. Baptism must import the most inward purification, the removal of that common evil which all men had inherited from Adam. "Then," it was argued, "he who wants this is necessarily lying under that common evil; he can be looked upon only as a natural creature." There were innumerable checks and counteractions to this opinion. It was incompatible with the interest which the more spiritual of the Fathers felt in the inquiries of Gentile philosophers, as bearing upon all the deepest mysteries of the Gospel; it was still more obviously incompatible with the view which they took of their own internal conflicts before they entered into the fold of Christ. But it became the formal recognised school maxim, and it could not be that without having the most direct influence upon practice. The influence was felt more bitterly and painfully within the Church than without it. Many Christians were found to be leading as sinful lives as heathens. It could not be doubted that their responsibilities were greater, and that, therefore, their sin must be greater. An inference was speedily deduced from that fact. The blessings of Baptism were said to be infinite for those who first received it. Their sins were blotted out; they were new creatures. But the blessings were exhausted in the act. Every ​subsequent step, in the immense majority of cases, perhaps in every case, was a step out of purity into evil. The white robes were soiled; the divine offering for sin had been spurned; pardon could only be hoped for by continual acts of repentance and mortification.

In this instance, as in the other, the counteracting influences were most numerous. The Psalms were still the great book of Church devotion. They spoke of flying to God as a refuge from all enemies; of sins being forgiven and iniquities covered; of God not de- siring sacrifice and offerings. The Creed proclaimed belief in forgiveness of sin, as part of the ordinary and necessary faith of a Christian man; the Lord’s Prayer taught him to say, "Our Father"; the Eucharist was a continual thanksgiving for a sacrifice offered and accepted. Still the doctrine of post-baptismal sin had been proclaimed; the understanding could not refute it; the sin-stricken conscience confirmed it; the natural inference that it was much safer to defer baptism to the latest moment was drawn, and, as in the case of the first Christian emperor, reduced into. practice. Constantine had settled the debates of the Donatists, and presided at a Council concerning the deepest mysteries of the faith, before he received the rite of initiation. He availed himself of the delay to murder his son, and to leave orders for the slaughter of the most conspicuous members of his family.

If this memorable example of the moral consequences of the doctrine had been wanting, there was more than enough in the despair with which it inspired numbers of those who had received the Sacrament, in the experiments to which that despair drove them, in the utter confusion of their thoughts respecting the character of God and the services which He ​required of them, to startle its most resolute champion. But it continued to dwell in the minds of good men, because for them it was to a great extent inoperative; their love for God and His family, and for the whole world, made any opinion they held a reason for severity to themselves, and for tenderness to their brethren. They could not see any logical escape from this one; they conspired with bad men to suggest practices for curing outward sins, or removing the sores they left in the heart, which strengthened and deepened it. And thus it seemed as if the great line which separated the Church from the world was one which could not be wisely passed; for, by the Church’s confession, the majority of those who were within it were not better than the rest of men, and were exposed to a more dreadful doom.

But if this line was not deep enough, others might be drawn. One class of baptized men might be allowed to rest contented with an ordinary secular life—to marry, rule the household, and do those works which were considered godly by the patriarchs and prophets, and which St. Paul commanded the ministers as well as the members of the churches he founded to perform; others might become religious,—might eschew, as far as possible, human ties and obligations, and give themselves to the service of God. Here was another experiment for the purpose of separating the righteous from the unrighteous. A Church was to be set up within the Church. The whole fellowship was not one of saints, but it was one which might nurture saints. There were two great counteractions to the habit of mind which this division indicated. The first lay in the feeling of Churchmen that they were meant to rule the world, and therefore must take part in all ​the most secular affairs of it, whatever danger there was of defilement from them. The second arose from the strange discovery, that those who were felt and confessed to be the truest saints in virtue of the influence which they exerted, were precisely those who broke down the barriers which had been raised between them and ordinary people. They ate and drank with publicans and sinners. They were especially witnesses to the people of a common Friend and Redeemer, who cared for all. But these existing agencies enable us to understand better the effect of the belief itself on the morality of the Church. Its dealings with the ordinary business of the world took a particularly cunning, sordid, debasing form, because that ordinary business was supposed to be destined only for a lower Christian caste; the very sympathies which were most truly human and divine looked artificial, because, according to the theory, they were portions of the saintly ideal, and the means by which it was exhibited to men. And the lowering effect of the scheme upon those who gathered from it that their calling was to shuffle through existence as they could, and only to expect that divine helpers would be found waiting for them at the close of it, no words can describe.

2. At last there came a clear and effectual testimony against these notions, and the practices to which they had given birth. And it took this form:—It said, "You are seeking to make yourselves just or righteous before God. You cannot do it. There is but one Righteousness—that which is in Christ—for the worst and the best of us. You are seeking to deliver yourselves by this and that experiment from the sense of the evils you have committed. You cannot do it. Faith in the Son of God is the only deliverance for the conscience of ​any man. You are not free till you trust Him; till you are free, you cannot do the works of a freeman, but only those of a slave." The Reformers who bore this protest were obliged to carry it still farther back They were forced to say, as St. Paul had said before them, "God Himself is the justifier. He has given Christ for our sins, and has raised Him again for our justification. He calls you, each of you, to know that Just One, in whom you are accepted."

It is impossible not to see that this was levelling language; it was breaking down, to all appearance, the barriers between the righteous and the wicked—barriers which centuries had been at work to build up. Nay, it seemed as if this language carried one beyond the limits of the Church ; as if any man might claim the righteousness of Christ, might have his conscience set free from sin, might believe that God had justified him. The Romanists charged both these consequences of their doctrine upon their opponents, “By preaching faith without the deeds of the law,” they said, "you efface moral distinctions; by speaking so generally as you do of Christ’s death and resurrection, you seem to take away the privileges of the baptized man." The Reformers retaliated. "You," they said, "are guilty of the sin you impute to us. You have overthrown all difference between the pure and the impure; you have done so inevitably, because you have destroyed all difference between those who believe and those who do not believe." That being the danger which they dreaded most, they set themselves to consider how they might most successfully avoid it. The result was a new set of experiments to separate the Church from the world, and then to create a Church within the Church, Faith justifies, but it must be ascertained who ​have faith. Christ’s is the only righteousness; but to whom is that righteousness imputed? God calls men to the knowledge of His Son; but if He calls, does He not also reject? It seemed to Protestant divines and laymen just as necessary to invent plans for dividing the faithful from the unbelieving,—those who belonged to Christ from those who had no relation to Him,—the elect from the reprobate,—as it had ever seemed necessary to the Romanist to divide heathens from baptized men, ecclesiastics from the laity, the saint from the ordinary Christian. And I think it must be owned that the effects in each case have been similar. The great moral distinctions which God’s law proclaims, and which the conscience of man affirms, have not been deepened but obliterated; fictitious maxims and standards have been introduced, which are as unfavourable to the common honesty of daily life as they are to any higher righteousness which we should seek as citizens of God’s kingdom, as creatures formed in His image. It seems as if faith signified a persuasion that God will not punish us hereafter for the sins we have committed here, because we have that persuasion; as if some men were accounted righteous, for Christ’s sake, by a mere deception, it not being the fact that they are righteous; as if God pleased of mere arbitrariness that certain men should escape His wrath, and that certain men should endure the full measure of it. I find it hard even to state these propositions without being guilty of a kind of profaneness and a kind of uncharitableness, so shocking do they sound when they are put into plain words, and so wrong is it to suppose that any man holds them in the sense which those words seem to convey, But it is not wrong,—it is a great duty,—to set them out broadly and nakedly, that those who ​have dallied with thoughts which are capable of such a construction may shudder, and may ask themselves whether this, or anything like this, is their meaning; or, if not, what they do mean. Provided always that we admit in this instance, as in that of the Romanists, what enormous influences there are at work to neutralise these notions and statements,—even to change them into their direct opposites; how strong and earnest their desire is for freedom from sin, and their willingness to bear any punishment rather than be slaves of sin, who seem as if they thought their faith was merely to procure them an exemption from penalties which others must suffer; how serious ¢heir zeal for God’s truth, who seem by their words as if they could bear to suspect Him of a fiction; how thoroughly in their hearts they acknowledge God to be without partiality, and to be altogether just, whose phrases ascribe to Him a principle of conduct upon which they would themselves be ashamed to act. I repeat what I said before—the more frankly and thankfully we make these admissions, the more we are bound to labour, that the faith which is in the hearts of men may not be extinguished in them, and utterly misrepresented to their children, by the perilous unbelief which they allow to mingle with it. For the sake of the precious good, we must wrestle with its counterfeit. And this, I believe, we can only do by resolving, once for all, that since every attempt which has been hitherto made to draw lines and limitations about the Gospel of God, for the purpose of dividing the righteous from the wicked, has tended to confound them,—to put evil for good, and good for evil,—we will abstain in future from all such attempts, and will ask seriously whether God has not Himself established eternal distinctions, which become clear to us when, and ​only when, we are content to be the heralds of His free and universal love. I think it may be shown, not only that these distinctions are most recognised when we look upon all men as interested in Christ’s Death and Resurrection, but that we cannot do justice to the zeal of Romanists for Baptism, of Protestants for Faith,—that we cannot reconcile the one with the other, paying the highest honour to each,—till we claim the wider ground from which they are both inclined to drive us. I think that we shall find that the Scriptures, interpreted simply,—interpreted specially in connection with the fact of the Resurrection which has lately occupied us,—explain and vindicate each of these apparently inconsistent tenets, but explain and vindicate them by taking from each its exclusive and inhuman, and with that, its fictitious and immoral, character.

3. If we start from the point at which we arrived in the last Essay, and believe that the Christ, the King of man’s spirit, having taken the flesh of man, willingly endured the death of which that flesh is heir, and that His Father, by raising Him from the dead, declared that death and the grave and hell could not hold Him, because He was His righteous and well-beloved Son, we have that first and highest idea of Justification which St. Paul unfolds to us. God justifies the Man who perfectly trusted in Him; declares Him to have the only righteousness which He had ever claimed,—the only one which it would not have been a sin and a fall for Him to claim, the righteousness of His Father,—the righteousness which was His so long as He would have none of His own, so long as He was content to give up Himself. "He was put to death in the flesh, He was justified in the Spirit;" this is the Apostle’s language; this is his clear, noble, satisfactory distinc​tion, which is reasserted in various forms throughout the New Testament. But St. Paul takes it for granted that this justification of the Son of God and the Son of man was his own justification—his own, not because he was Saul of Tarsus, not because he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, but because he was a man. All his zeal as an Apostle of the Gentiles, all his arguments against his own countrymen, have this ground and no other; the one would have worn out from contempt and persecution, the other would have fallen utterly to pieces, if he had not been assured that Christ’s resurrection declared Him to be the Son of man, the Head of man, and therefore that His justification was the justification of each man. He had not arrived at this discovery without tremendous personal struggles. He had felt far more deeply than Job did how much he was at war with the law of his being, the law which he was created to obey; he had felt far more deeply than Job that there was a righteousness near him and in him, in which his inner mind delighted. He had been sure that there must be a Redeemer to give the righteousness the victory over the evil, to deliver him out of the power to which he was sold, to satisfy the spirit in him which longed for good. He had thanked God through Jesus Christ his Lord. And now he felt that he was a righteous man; that he had the only righteousness which a man could have,—the righteousness of God,—the righteousness which is upon faith,—the righteousness which is not for Jew more than for Gentile,—which is for all alike.

How impossible, then, was it for him to receive Baptism as if it were merely the outward badge of a profession,—a sign which separated the sect of the Nazarenes from other Jews, or other men! If it ​marked him out as a Christian, that was because it denoted that he would no more be the member of any sect, of any partial society whatever—that he was claiming his relation to the Son of God, the Head of the whole human race. It must import his belief that this Son of God, and not Adam, was the true root of Humanity; that from Him, and not from any ancestor, each man derived his life. It must import his acknowledgment, that in himself, in his flesh, dwelt no good thing; but that he was not obliged or intended to live as a creature of flesh, as a separate self-seeking being; that it was utterly contrary to God’s order that he should. But if Baptism imported se much, it must import more. Paul had not devised it, or invented it. An act which expressed the giving up of himself could not be one which. only signified that he had made a choice between two religions, abandoning one, adopting another. He had done nothing of the kind. He had not abandoned his Jewish faith; he was holding it fast, maintaining that it had been proved to be true throughout. He was not adopting a Christian religion. He was simply submitting himself to a Son of David as being also the Son of God. Baptism, then, he accepted as the ordinance of God for men, as His declaration of that which is true concerning men, of the actual relation in which men stand to Him. If He had justified His Son by raising Him from the dead,—if, in that act, He had justified the race for which Christ had died,—then it was lawful to tell men that they were justified before God, that they were sons of God in the only-begotten Son; it was lawful to tell them that the act which, by Christ’s command, accompanied the preaching of the Gospel to all nations, signified this, and nothing less than this. If Christ was not the actual Mediator between ​God and man,—if His resurrection did not declare that God confessed Him in that character, and thereby confessed men to be righteous in Him,—Baptism was a nullity, a mere delusion; it ought not to be associated with the proclamation of facts so stupendous. A message professing to come from God, who is a Spirit, and concerning all the mysteries of man’s spiritual life, should not be linked to a poor petty rite which denoted merely his external position.

By declaring in plain words that they who were baptized into Christ were baptized into His death,—that they put on-Christ, that they were to count themselves dead indeed to sin, but alive unto God, risen with Christ,—St. Paul pointed out the ever-effectual protection against the error into which the Church afterwards fell; the one great divine distinction for which it substituted its awkward and mischievous theories and practices. So long as Baptism was really felt to denote the true and eternal law of man’s relation to God, so long it could give no excuse for those notions respecting post-baptismal sin out of which such enormous and complicated evils were developed. How could those who believed that God had declared His Son to be the root of righteousness for every man,—that they were baptized into Him, adopted to be sons of God in Him,—teach any human creature that he had had a certain righteousness, justification, freedom from evil, for a moment, but that when he had yielded to the lusts of the flesh, or the power of the Evil Spirit, these blessings were his no longer? Of course, it would be so if his righteousness were his own property, if it could ever become his own property. But if what baptism proclaimed was precisely, that it never could,—that the notion of a self-righteousness is ​false in principle, the greatest of all contradictions,—then it must be the right and duty of men at all times to turn to Him in whom they are created, redeemed, justified; their trust was either lawful at no time, or it was lawful at every time; on no principle, save that of continual trust in the Lord of his spirit, could a man assert the privilege and glory of his baptism, and rise above his enemies. Whatever doctrine robbed him of that trust, or led him to build his life and conduct upon distrust, was earthly, sensual, devilish.

The Reformers, I conceive, were not denying the strongest assertions of St. Paul respecting baptism when they used this language, and called on all men to believe in the Son of God for their justification. In fact, they appealed to these assertions continually; they were their most effectual weapons. Nor, I conceive, did they pervert or weaken these words when they said that the Church was falling into the condition of a mere world, and that faithful men must be the instruments of raising it out of that condition. Faith, they said,—and the conscience of men confirmed their words,—is the ground of right hearty action; unbelief makes it impossible.

"Yes," replies the Romanist, "and your Protestant mode of reforming the universal Church was to split it into a thousand sects; your Protestant way of asserting the preciousness of faith was, to leave us nothing in which we should believe." The mockery is severe, and it is deserved. Sectarianism has been the effect of the schemes which Protestants have adopted for the purpose of defining who have a right to be members of Christ’s Church, and who have not; the loss of a distinct and common object of faith has been the effect ​of the schemes which Protestants have adopted to ascertain who have and who have not the gift of faith, or the right to believe. They have sought to be wiser than God, and God has confounded their vanity. He has laid one foundation for a universal Church, and they thought they might make foundations for themselves. He has established the great distinctions, that there is in every man a spirit which seeks righteousness and a flesh which stoops to evil; that there is with every man the Christ, who would quicken his spirit, and deliver his soul and body out of death; and with every man an evil power, who tempts him to become the slave of his flesh, and so to destroy his soul and body; that in Christ, the true Lord of their spirit, men are claimed as sons of God, and that they, by distrusting Him, and yielding to the devil, become utterly unlike Him, forming themselves in the image of the father whom they have chosen. And we, for these great practical divine contrasts, which will be brought out in the clear light of God’s judgment-day, and which nothing in earth or hell or heaven can alter or modify, must have our own sects of spiritual and carnal men; of those who can make it clear to us that they believe, and of those who cannot—divisions which are so many premiums to hypocrisy, so many hindrances to honest men, so many temptations to him whose experiences have acquired for him the title "religious" to think that he has not a world and flesh and devil to struggle with, while he may be convincing a looker-on, by his ordinary behaviour, that he is an obedient slave of all three; which tempt those who are treated as carnal and worldly to believe what they are told of themselves, to act as if they had not that longing for good which they yet know that they have, and which God does not ​disown, for His Son has awakened it, though His servants may be stifling it.

Most assuredly the curse of God is upon these Protestant devices, and we shall feel it more and more. But is the refuge in going back to those who have been guilty of framing devices for the same ungodly end,—devices, the condemnation of which is written in the history of the world? Is it not rather in the bolder, freer proclamation of God’s universal Gospel of a Church founded on Christ the Son of God and the Son of man, of His justification of each man as a spiritual creature, a child of God created to trust. Him, to know Him, to exhibit His likeness.

I have alluded to the sympathy which existed between orthodox English Churchmen and Unitarians in the last century, on the subject of the conversions and spiritual struggles upon which the Evangelical teachers dwelt so much. There was an alliance also between these same parties against the leading Evangelical doctrine. Both alike foretold that the consequence of holding and preaching justification by faith must be the weakening of moral obligations. "A high-flown pedantical morality might be cultivated by those who adhered to this tenet; plain home-spun English honesty and good faith would be undermined by it."

When the Evangelical teachers appealed to our Articles, in defence of their proposition, they used a good argumentum ad hominem for one division of their opponents; it had no weight at all for the other. The evidence they required was of a different kind, and it was not wanting. The Edinburgh Review, by adopting Sir James Stephen’s delightful Essay "On the Clapham School," has practically declared that the ​cause of which was the ablest champion forty years ago, is not now defensible; that the men who, if the words of its accomplished clerical ally were true, must have been utterly fantastical, as well as fanatical,—governing themselves by some absurd imaginary principle, which has nothing to do with the business of the world,—were really simple, clear-hearted, clear-headed men, who were faithful in their callings, who infused a new and juster spirit into commercial life, who compelled politicians to acknowledge other maxims than those of party, another object than that of advancing themselves. There can be now no manner of doubt that the existence of such men had the most purifying, elevating influence upon English society; that they did very much to overthrow that morality of sentiment which the Anti-Jacobin could only ridicule, and to counteract the stock-jobbing tendencies of the day, which some of those whom the Anti-Jacobin most lauded were nurturing. Their one great testimony, that a man can never be a chattel, was the most significant practical commentary on all they said of the worth of the individual soul—a proof how thoroughly their doctrine possessed their lives,—an example to all after generations ;—seeing that the very time they chose for making this protest was the one in which the doctrine of the individual rights of men was frightening them and most of their political associates;—seeing that they were accused of promoting Jacobinism as well as of putting the wealth and commerce of the great English cities in peril, and that they nevertheless persevered, in the faith that evil must be denounced at all hazards, and that that which is wrong in the tendencies of a time can only be effectually resisted by the assertion of the right which is most akin to it. This was faith, ​and these men were in the true sense "just by faith." Their outward acts proceeded from a principle; that principle was Trust in an unseen Person.

Why do those who talk most of justification by faith in our day exhibit no similar fruits? Why is English society not raised or purified by their presence in it? Why are the tradesmen among them as ready as any others to mix chicory with their coffee? the merchants and politicians to job? the divines to slander? Is it not because they believe justification by faith, instead of believing in Christ the Justifier? Is not the whole principle changed? Is not the formula which represents the principle doing duty for it?

I know well how many there are in the modern Evangelical school who imitate the faith as well as the works of their fathers. I know how deeply they are grieved by the crowd of heartless and noisy champions who defend their cause because it is the popular and patronised one now, as they would have cursed it and slandered its professors fifty years ago. I entreat the Unitarians to compare these two classes: those whom they cannot for one moment suspect of hypocrisy, to whose honesty and simplicity of character they are willing to do homage; and those whom they have a right to condemn as loud-talking, unreal bigots,—bitter against all who differ from them, in proportion as they feel their own ground insecure, I entreat them to ask themselves whether the most striking characteristic of the former, so far as they are able to judge, is not faith in and devotion to a living Person, whom they reverence as their Lord, and to whom they cleave as their Friend? whether the others are not as evidently fighting for a notion or a theory? Supposing this to be the case, then are not the former holding with a strong ​grasp that very belief which the Unitarian idea of Christ would wrest from them? Would not the loss to the other, if that idea were forced upon them, be very inconsiderable indeed? If the anti-orthodox faith obtained the ascendency which it once held among the Vandals in Africa, and were as persecuting as it was among them, is there not the highest probability that this latter class would supply a band of ready, promising, very soon vehement converts to the new system? Is it not certain that the former would withstand it to the death?

There is one fact recorded by the faithful and affectionate biographer of the Clapham school, which I should be very dishonest and cowardly if I suppressed. It is, that one of the neighbours of Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Thornton, who was united with them in many of their benevolent projects, and in close personal friendship, was professedly and notoriously a Unitarian. It must have puzzled him greatly at first to explain how all the plain and practical virtues which he saw in them not only accompanied,—that he might have accounted for on his general maxims of toleration,—but manifestly flowed out of, the faith which he had been taught was so likely to beget immorality. It may have puzzled them almost equally to understand how he, an opposer of that faith, not only performed right acts, but exhibited, as we are told he did, that habitual rectitude which they would ordinarily and rightly attribute to some deep root. I suppose he came at last to some solution of his difficulty which satisfied him. I should think their faith in Christ the Justifier must have been the solution of theirs. As that grew stronger, they must have said more and more frequently, "Thou, O Lord, art more than all our systems and calculations. ​Thou mayest perchance have rule in a thousand hearts, where they are not admitted, even as it is clear Thou dost not rule in many where they are received." And that conclusion, instead of leading them to Latitudinarianism, will have saved them from it. How could they ever give up their faith in Christ as a living Person, when they traced not only all that was not evil in themselves, but all that was good in any man, to Him? If they had not only seen that truth at certain times, but had been able to state it fully at all times, from how much of misery might they have saved some of their contemporaries, from how much vagueness and infidelity their descendants! Need Cowper have sunk into despair if he had believed that Christ was in him at all times, and was not dependent upon his apprehension or faith? Would his evangelical biographers have been reduced to the miserable—not always the successful—apology, that his madness was not caused or aggravated by his Christianity? Might they not have had to give thanks that that was the cure of it? If Blanco White had ever learnt to extend that belief to all men, would he have approached the confines of speculative atheism?

I ask these questions with fear; but I think, for many reasons, that they should be asked. And since the last of them has a very close interest for the new school of Unitarians, I would venture to offer one or two more thoughts for their reflection. They have learnt from Mr. Carlyle and others to speak of faith in a tone altogether different from that which was common in the last generation. I would respectfully inquire of them whether they are not, ever and anon, falling into the error which I have attributed to our modern Evangelicals, and which infects many beside ​them,—that of making Faith itself an object of trust, almost of worship? I know how they will escape from the charge. "Oh no!" they will say, "we mean, not faith in Faith, but faith in an idea. Don’t you know what Mr. Emerson says of the Mahometans, that they overthrew hosts because they were horsed on an idea? What we object to is your doctrine that faith in a Christian idea is the only faith." I beg to disclaim any such representation of my doctrine. I acknowledge that Mahomet triumphed over hosts; I acknowledge that he triumphed by faith. "Yes! by faith in a real living God. His opponents were horsed upon ideas (or rather conceptions of their own mind); therefore the horses and the riders were cast into the sea. I think that his faith could overcome much, because it was faith in a substance, a reality, a Person. I do not think it could overcome the world, or the flesh, or the devil. I think all three have proved, in the issue, too strong for the Mahometan. I accept the Apostle John’s explanation of the two conditions which are necessary to a complete victory. It has stood the test of much experience, and will, I think, stand the test of all. "This is the victory that overcometh the world; even our Faith." "Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?"